Forget about the phones Nokia announced last week at Mobile World Congress, there’s two applications they demoed at the show that I want to highlight: Nokia Transport and Nokia Reading. Starting with the first one, it’s a Windows Phone app that will tell you how to reach your destination using nothing but good old walking and public transportation. I’m all for being green and using the services that your city offers, but this app is for Nokia handsets only. Why does Stephen Elop, the CEO of Nokia, go on and on about Windows Phone being in a “War of Ecosystems”, yet instead of contributing something as useful as Nokia Transport to said ecosystem he decides it’s a much better idea to make it a Nokia exclusive? Assuming the app was expensive to build in terms of data collection, UI concepting, and actual coding, why not sell it to people who happen to have a Windows Phone made by another handset vendor? It just doesn’t make sense.
Next up is Nokia Reading, which can best be described as Nokia’s version of iBooks, which is in itself Apple’s version of Amazon’s Kindle service. Hasn’t Nokia learned from the complete and utter failure of Ovi that maybe they should partner with established players instead of rolling out their own thing? There’s a corporate term for this called “Not Invented Here”, which basically means companies would rather make something themselves instead of using a well establish product or service just so they could push their brand. You don’t see Apple trying to clone Flickr just to say that they have an image sharing site. And while yes, there’s a strong possibility that Nokia will create “Nokia Reading” for what will eventually be a Windows 8 powered tablet, Amazon has a Kindle application that runs on every single platform under the sun. They also have a massive catalog that’s been built over the past few years that Nokia can’t possibly even dream of matching.
These two applications, Nokia Transport and Nokia Reading, demonstrate to me that there are still groups within the Finnish handset maker who are convinced that creating exclusive content for the sake of artificial differentiation is actually a good idea.
That sort of pre “War of Ecosystems” thinking isn’t tolerable in 2012.